Friedrich Nietzsche's Writings Literary Elements

Philosophy

From the perspective of Germany in the latter half of the 19th century

Nietzsche is always the narrator, but that is not necessarily true of the point of view. The perspective is best described as contrarian—Nietzsche often seems to be inherently against whatever the mainstream holds to be true. But it is important to realize that his point of view is often ironic, purposely elevating his contrary perspective to make a point.

Tonal shifts are a trademark of Nietzsche. He can be corrosively satirical, almost embarrassingly sincere, polemical, didactic, sublimely subtle, hilarious, maddening, blasphemous, ecclesiastical and seemingly insane not just across the breadth of his writings, and not just within a single work, but sometimes almost on a single page. However, the mood is almost consistent: a disdain for mediocrity and lack of imagination.

Protagonist: The hero of Nietzsche’s writings take on many different forms under a variety of names, but make no mistake, they are all just reflections of himself. Antagonist: The herd, Nietzsche’s term for the collective majority of human beings who engage in group behavior.

Nietzsche develops many thematic conflicts over the course of his body of work: Apollonian versus Dionysian culture, the herd versus the overman, science versus religion, Christian values versus science’s value-neutral position.

The whole point of Nietzsche’s philosophy is that there is no conflict. Climax inherent implies a fundamental truth has been reached which is the very antithesis of Nietzschean perspectivism: the rejection of the very concept that absolute truths exist.

To read Nietzsche is like an exercise in foreshadowing. His writing is predictive of the rise of nationalism, coming of pop culture at the expensive of high culture, the dumbing down of America, and even the Holocaust.

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Nietzsche’s body of work is filled with allusions to historical figures, ancient literature, music and the fine arts. The Birth of Tragedy features an allusion on almost every page. Thus Spake Zarathustra is an entire textual allusion to the teachings of a pre-Christian Persian philosopher named Zoroaster.

Nietzsche is responsible for what is arguably the single most significant single example of philosophical imagery since the ancient Greeks and, quite possibly, ever. When Zarathustra pronounced that “God is dead” the world of philosophy was changed forever. This image has been, as usual with Nietzsche, been corrupted to mean many different things, but its original meaning is far less blasphemous than it may appear: Nietzsche uses the image of god’s death to portray the collapse of religious faith in the wake of the scientific revolution. Science thus becomes the new god.

The greatest paradox at the center of Nietzsche’s writing is the tension that exists between Apollonian and Dionysian principles. Apollonian is concerned with beauty, surfaces and order while, of course, Dionysian principles reflect just the opposite. Nietzsche himself aligns with the Dionysian, but argues that neither can or should exist without the other. That, in fact, paradoxically chaos is dependent upon order for the creation of true genius.

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Germany. Very often—very, very often—Nietzsche references the “German spirit.” At one point, he even takes the step of narrowing this common example of synecdoche in which the singularly defining name of a country is a stand-in for the much broader collective of the population down to a few specific examples: “Luther, Goethe, Schiller.”

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